Abstractions and sensor design in partial-information, reactive controller synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces an abstraction-based approach for synthesizing reactive controllers under partial observation, enabling the systematic discovery and refinement of sensing modalities to ensure feasible control solutions.

Contribution

It proposes a formalism and methodology to incorporate sensing limitations into controller synthesis, improving applicability to systems with large or infinite states.

Findings

Effective abstraction procedure for systems with partial observation.

Systematic method for discovering necessary sensing modalities.

Successful demonstration on robotic motion planning examples.

Abstract

Automated synthesis of reactive control protocols from temporal logic specifications has recently attracted considerable attention in various applications in, for example, robotic motion planning, network management, and hardware design. An implicit and often unrealistic assumption in this past work is the availability of complete and precise sensing information during the execution of the controllers. In this paper, we use an abstraction procedure for systems with partial observation and propose a formalism to investigate effects of limitations in sensing. The abstraction procedure enables the existing synthesis methods with partial observation to be applicable and efficient for systems with infinite (or finite but large number of) states. This formalism enables us to systematically discover sensing modalities necessary in order to render the underlying synthesis problems feasible. We use counterexamples, which witness unrealizability potentially due to the limitations in sensing and the coarseness in the abstract system, and interpolation-based techniques to refine the model and the sensing modalities, i.e., to identify new sensors to be included, in such synthesis problems. We demonstrate the method on examples from robotic motion planning.